Using Food and Nutritional Strategies to Induce Tolerance in Food-Allergic Children

Food allergy is an important and increasing public health problem worldwide, affecting predominantly infants and young children. There is an urgent need to develop effective treatment strategies to restore oral tolerance in food-allergic individuals. Among diverse research approaches, those involving native or heat-modified food proteins are most advanced and are currently being evaluated in clinical trials. Extensively heated (baked) milk and egg diets have already been adopted in clinical practice and benefit the majority of milk- and egg-allergic children. Oral, sublingual and epicutaneous immunotherapy with native foods remain in the sphere of clinical research with encouraging data suggesting that they may induce desensitization in a large proportion of treated patients and potentially permanent tolerance following an adequately long period of treatment. Synbiotics appear to have the most beneficial role in the prevention of food allergy; Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG may promote the development of tolerance to milk in allergic infants.